I used it the last time I travelled, it worked just fine, and I assumed it did the regular amount of data harvesting my daily phone and internet service providers do.

I had a 1060 for a good few years that I used primarily with Arch and never really had an issue. At the time it didn’t play nicely with Wayland, so I was still using Xorg instead, but I think that’s a solved issue by now. Nvidia just doesn’t support newer features as readily as AMD does it seems. It really should have no bearing on your ability to play games.

I wrote something similar about returning to traditional music formats on my own blog https://audiovalentine.com/2025/01/death-to-spotify-a-survey-of-alternatives/